This invention generally relates to displaying computer documents; and, more specifically, to displaying computer documents that are identified, or shown, a plurality of times in a view and accessed or opened via each appearance of the document in the view.
In various document management applications, a document may be identified or shown several times in a single view, and the document may be accessed or opened from each appearance of the document in the view. The multiple appearances of the document in the view may be associated with very similar, but often slightly different, uses or tasks.
For instance, computer programs have been developed to assist the design and development of other computer programs. As an example, these computer design assist programs may separate a project into a group of phases, and may separate each phase into a group or set of individual tasks. With some development programs, the general definitions and explanations of the tasks are repeated from phase-to-phase. Such a development program may be represented, for example, as: Phase I/tasks x, y and z; Phase II/tasks x, y and z; and Phase III/tasks x, y and z. Commonly, the development programs will have a view that shows all the phases and tasks in the project.
These development programs usually hold documents that contain a description of, and other information relating to, the individual tasks, such as those represented above as tasks x, y and z. When a particular task is being performed, the designer will typically display or look at the computer document describing the task. Commonly, these development programs will have at least one view that lists, or identifies in some abbreviated manner, all the phases and tasks in the project, and the documents describing the individual tasks may be accessed or opened from that one view.
As programs of the above-described type are being used to develop other programs, it may be desirable to record and to display information relating to specific ones of the tasks that is not the same from phase-to-phase. With many development programs, there is no easy and simple way to do this.
This could, of course, be done by making multiple copies of each task description document, so that there is a respective one basic document copy associated with each occurrence of each.task. Then, if a user wanted to record information relating to a specific task occurrence, that information could be recorded in the document copy associated with that task occurrence. This approach, however, results in an unnecessarily large database.
An object of this invention is to improve procedures for displaying computer documents.
Another object of the present invention is to display multiple variations of a base or main document without requiring multiple copies of the main document.
These and other objectives are attained with a method of and a system for displaying computer documents. The method comprises the steps of identifying a base document a plurality of times in a view, each of said plurality of times being associated with a respective use; and for each of those uses, establishing a respective associated reference document. Each of the reference documents stores information specific to the associated use. The method further includes the step of accessing the base document via one of the times the base document is identified in the view. This accessing is done by (i) accessing the one reference document associated with said one of said times, (ii) using that one reference document to access the base document, and (iii) merging and displaying as one document contents of the base document and the use specific information from the one reference document.
Preferably the method further comprises the steps of storing in each of the reference documents a key identifying the base document, and establishing variables identifying the reference documents to the base document. With this preferred embodiment, the step of using the one reference document to access the main document includes the step of using the key in said one reference document to access the main document. Also the merging and displaying step includes the step of using one of these established variables to identify said one of the reference documents to the base document to enable data passing that is used to merge data from said one reference document and the base document into an integrated display of information.